Links for the Week Ending 2 February 2014

A year ago, the U.S. was suffering from a major drought in the Great Plains area. This year, it is California that is experiencing an unprecedented lack of rainfall. The US Drought Monitor shows the situation here, and The New York Times reports on the implications for California here. If you want to put this drought in some perspective, then I recommended looking at a series of charts published by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) that can be found here. In particular, look at the time series chart half-way down the post that shows drought categories for the contiguous U.S. changing over time. The U.S. does appear to be experiencing more exceptional (D4) droughts in recent years but the overall drought picture looks more mixed.

Preliminary figures suggest that the U.K. economy grew 1.9% in 2013. Much of the media has now accepted a narrative of continued recovery, but there are a few dissenting voices. The Telegraph‘s Liam Halligan in an article titled “Britain’s shaky growth is papering over cracks” points to missing fixed capital investment, a worsening external balance, more debt and a growing real estate and financial asset bubble as all suggesting that the expansion will end in tears. Halligan also quotes a pamphlet by Douglas Carswell at Potiteia (here), which links every credit boom since the 1970s with a subsequent real economy bust.

On a similar theme, I have talked a lot about stagnating median incomes in the U.S. that date back to the 1970s (such as here), but have rarely referred to the experience in the U.K. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) published a report on this topic on January 31 called “An Examination of Falling Real Wages, 2010 – 2013″, which has drawn a lot of press comment, such as this in The Guardian. It came out just a day after a study by the Institute of Fiscal Studies looking at the same theme (here), with commentary by The Financial Times (access free after registration) here. I intend to post on this issue soon.

Time for some interesting eco counter-culture thinking with David Holmgren’s “Crash on Demand” paper, in which the permaculture guru upgrades ‘brown tech’ as his mostly likely scenario for the future—that is, one of severe climate change but a slow decline in energy usage. He then goes on to suggest that a global economic crash is in the interest of the sustainability community, and that it should be positively encouraged. All provocative stuff and sufficient to give rise to a flurry of posts within the ‘descent’ blogosphere, including comments by Dmitry Orlov (here), Nicole Foss (here) and Rob Hopkins (here).